A Green History of the World

The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

430 pages, paperback, Penguin, 1993

A Green History addresses the influence of the environment on human history over
the past 10,000 years, starting with the expansion of hunting and gathering groups, and the
transition to settled agriculture. Ponting describes how exhaustion of the resources to which
they had access doomed many human societies.

Ponting begins with the history of human settlement on Easter Island. This history serves
as a cautionary example of the inability of a human society to stop destroying its natural
resources even when it is obvious that continued resource destruction will doom future generations
to life on a barren island with no possibility of escape. Our global society is now embarked
on an incomparably massive resource extraction. Will we transcend the barriers that previous
societies did not? Ponting does not propose solutions. He provides a wealth of illuminating
and extremely sobering historical detail.

Ponting substantially revised the book in 2007. We prefer the original book.

Quotes from A Green History of the World (1997 Edition)

"The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of
the world, must surely have realised that their very existence depended on the limited resources
of a small island. After all it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island
in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable
to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment. Instead
vital resources were steadily consumed until finally none were left. Indeed, at the very
time when the limitations of the island must have become starkly apparent, the competition
between the clans for the available timber seems to have intensified as more and more statues
were carved and moved across the island in an attempt to secure prestige and status. The
fact that so many were left unfinished or stranded near the quarry suggests that no account
was taken of how few trees were left on the island."

. . .

"All these states [the Sumerian states of Kish, Uruk, Ur and Lagash] were dependent on their
agricultural base for the large- scale production of wheat and barley and that was being
slowly undermined by environmental degradation brought about by irrigation. About 3500 BC
roughly equal amounts of wheat and barley were grown in southern Mesopotamia. But wheat can
only tolerate a salt level of half a per cent in the soil whereas barley can still grow in
twice this amount. The increasing salinisation of the soil can be deduced from the declining
amount of wheat cultivated and its replacement by the more salt tolerant barley. By 2500
BC wheat had fallen to only 15 per cent of the crop; by 2100 Ur had abandoned wheat production
and overall it had declined to just 2 percent of the crops grown in the Sumerian region.
By 2000 the cities of Isin and Larsa no longer grew wheat and by 1700 BC salt levels in the
soil throughout the whole of southern Mesopotamia were so high that no wheat at all was grown."

"What is remarkable is the way that the political history of Sumer and its city states so
closely follows the steady decline of the agricultural base. The independent city states
survived until 2370 BC when the first external conqueror of the region-- Sargon of Agade--established
the Akkadian empire. That conquest is contemporary with the first serious decline in crop
yields following widespread salinisation. For the next six hundred years the region saw the
Akkadian empire conquered by the Guti nomads from the Zagros mountains, a brief revival of
the region under the Third Dynasty of Ur between 2113-2000 BC, its collapse under pressure
from the Elamites in the west and Amorites in the east, and about 1800 BC the conquest of
the area by the Babylonian kingdom centered on northern Mesopotamia. Throughout this period,
from the end of the once flourishing and powerful city states to the Babylonian conquest,
crop yields continued to fall making it very difficult to sustain a visible state. By 1800
BC, when yields were only about a third of the level obtained during the Early Dynastic period,
the agricultural base of Sumer had effectively collapsed and the focus of Mesopotamian society
shifted permanently to the north, where a succession of imperial states controlled the region,
and Sumer declined into insignificance as an underpopulated, impoverished backwater of empire."

. . .

"In 1533 the English Parliament passed an act (the Scottish parliament had passed a similar
one in 1424) requiring all parishes to have nets to catch rooks, choughs and crows. This
was extended in 1566 so that churchwardens were authorized to pay for the corpses of foxes,
polecats, weasels, stoats, otters, hedgehogs, rats, mice, moles, hawks, buzzards, ospreys,
jays, ravens and kingfishers. In every area of England large hunts were carried out to try
to exterminate various animals. In 1723 at Prestbury in Cheshire 5,480 moles were destroyed,
at Northill in Bedfordshire between 1764 and 1774, 14,000 sparrows were killed (and 3,500
eggs destroyed) and at Deeping St. James in Lincolnshire in 1779, 4,152 sparrows were killed.
On one estate in the Scottish county of Sutherland in the early nineteenth century, 550 kingfishers
were killed in just three years. In the same county on just two estates 295 adult and sixty
young golden eagles (plus an unknown number of eggs) were destroyed between 1819-1826 (in
an attempt to preserve fish and game for sport). The deliberate slaughter continued into
the twentieth century--during the First World War the British government ordered the destruction
of sparrows in order to try and increase crop yields and special clubs were set up to carry
out the task. Their success can be judged from the fact that the one at Tring in Herfordshire
killed 39,000 in three years."